Someone who left a comment in LoCO’s “Thunderdome” last week thought I showed poor judgment in who I associate with because I have friends who are “homeless.” I realize that “homeless” is a bigoted term, as is the term “dope yuppies” which I also used to describe other friends of mine. I don’t usually talk about my friends in such pejorative terms, but in the context of the piece, those terms brought their legal, economic, and political status into focus. I used the term “homeless” to emphasize the level of disenfranchisement and prejudice my friends endure.

I didn’t use the term because I think they are bad people, quite the opposite. Most of the good, decent and interesting people in Southern Humboldt lack adequate housing, or are subject to the fickle whims of SoHum’s notorious slumlords. On the other hand, the real monsters in this community all seem to have nice, comfortable, stable homes. Gary Lee Bullock is a good example of the kind of people who live in nice homes, and come from respected SoHum families.

Gary Lee Bullock was high on meth, as usual, and started terrorizing his neighbors, who called the cops. He fought with the cops, who arrested him and took him to jail in Eureka. In Eureka, they charged him, booked him, and released him on his own recognizance. After that, while aimlessly wandering the streets of Eureka in the middle of the night, Bullock broke into the rectory of St. Bernard’s Catholic Church, and then tortured and killed Father Eric Freed, the Priest who lived there, before stealing Father Freed’s car and driving it back to his cozy SoHum home.

Zachary Brown makes a fine example as well, last Fall, Zachary, and a teenage accomplice beat an old man they did not know, almost to death, in the Garberville Town Square, with baseball bats. Zachary then walked back to his comfortable Garberville abode, leaving a trail of his victim’s blood all the way to the front door.

Then there’s Estelle Fennell, who works tirelessly to undermine the rights of poor people with new laws that criminalize poverty, ignores violent crime, as long as it is directed against poor people, and who appointed an unqualified Public Defender to make it even easier to railroad poor people into false convictions. These are the kind of people who have homes in Southern Humboldt. How could the people without homes be any worse?

I know that we have a few decent people living indoors here in Southern Humboldt, and a lot more who think they are decent people, and probably would be decent people, if they lived somewhere that encouraged them in that way, but if you are looking for genuinely decent, interesting people, you have a better chance of finding them among the people who pay rent, or can’t find a place to rent, than you do among the landed gentry.

That’s why I advocate for affordable housing and better treatment of the poor. I don’t do it out of charity. I do it because we need better people in SoHum. We need better people in SoHum, not richer people, or greedier people. We need better people, and better people have better things to do than squeeze bloody profits out of political corruption. Better people aren’t afraid of honest work, but they don’t want to work themselves to death either. Better people have better things to do. Nonetheless, better people deserve to be treated like human beings, and they deserve an affordable place to live.

The more we do to make life easier for people at the bottom end of the economic spectrum, the easier we make life for everyone, and the more attractive we make it for better people, and that’s how we build a better community. The problem is: the people at the top of the economic scale don’t see it that way.

Greed is a character flaw. It’s a kind of blindness connected to an inferiority complex. Greed creates a yawning chasm of need that enslaves greedy people who always want more. It comes across as pitifully coarse and shallow. Greed is insatiable, and it makes greedy people insufferable, and that’s a large part of the problem around here.

Greed takes a further toll when greedy bosses inevitably try to squeeze more work out of their employees. Overworked, poorly treated workers become bitter and resentful. Instead of resenting their greedy bosses, who they continue to suck-up to, they resent anyone who doesn’t work as hard as they do. Overwork tends to make people dull, and bitterness and resentment are not exactly attractive.

Finally, greed creates poverty. The needfulness of the greedy drives them to exploit the underclass, mercilessly, and the bitter resentment of overworked workers gets expressed in punitive attitudes and overt hostility towards the poor. Greedy people are too stingy to share, and resentful people like to see other people suffer, Together they they maximize the destructive power of poverty and inequality to destroy the lives of good people. Then they complain about all of the traumatized, and addicted people lying around who have no respect for this community.

You see how greed can really undermine the quality of the people, and the quality of life, in any community, but the black market in marijuana adds a whole new dimension to the sick, death-spiral of greed here in Southern Humboldt. As long as we remain focused on squeezing every last dollar out of each other, things are just going to get worse around here. On the other hand, everything we do to make this community more livable for people who don’t enslave themselves to greed, or work themselves to death, makes this community a better place to live, and tends to attract better people.

I pretended the recent Town Hall Meeting called by Humboldt County 2nd District Supervisor Estrelle Fennell to appease local drug dealers and the businesses that cater to them, who are now upset about the lack of police presence in Southern Humboldt. Unlike many community meetings I’ve attended, at this meeting, my community really impressed me with their honesty, candor and eloquence. I would like to share the highlights, just so that lygsbtd readers get a sense of how this unique community works together to solve serious problems.

By way of background: For many years now, drug related murders, disappearances, violent crimes and home invasions have been a normal part of life here in Southern Humboldt County. At least half-a-dozen people have gone missing, under suspicious circumstances, this year alone, and too many of those crimes go unsolved, but a recent event has shocked this small, remote, rural community to it’s core, and sparked a wave of outrage.

On the night of May10, 2014, an 18 year old kid from Fortuna, broke into a local head-shop and stole some bongs. As hideous as this crime is to contemplate, a skinny teenager, shimmying under the security door of a head-shop in the far back corner of an industrial park on the outskirts of town, one fact in the case horrified the community even more.

It seems that the perpetrator’s initial intrusion triggered an automatic alarm system that notified the Sheriff’s Department, but no deputies were ever dispatched to investigate the break in. Obviously noting the lack of response, the intruder went back into the store a second and third time, stealing more bongs, and leaving fingerprints as well as his image recorded on surveillance video. All together, the kid stole about $3,500 worth of overpriced dope smoking toys, which were then recovered when the kid was apprehended.

As you can understand, even though SoHum owes most of it’s prosperity to the fact that there are no cops here, this event has outraged this community. The idea of a young person, with a wanton disregard for private property, coming to SoHum and stealing from a community of underworld gangsters and drug kingpins, is terrifying enough, but the fact that the Sheriff didn’t send an officer two hours out of his way, to investigate a call from a machine, has suddenly made people feel unsafe in their own homes.

Facing a barrage of criticism, 2nd district Supervisor Estrelle Fennell called the meeting, and dragged Humboldt County Sheriff Morton Downey along, to face a gymnasium packed with angry drug dealers eager to vent their spleen.

Supervisor Fennell opened the meeting with an eloquent statement that summed up the situation beautifully. I think I can recall it verbatim:

“For two or three generations now, politicians, law enforcement and underworld criminals have worked together to perpetrate the most heinous crime against humanity to take place in North America since slavery and the genocide of the American Indians. Over the last four decades, the War on Drugs has decimated cities all over America and destroyed tens of millions of American lives.” Supervisor Fennell began.

“And it’s not like this community has been immune to the terrible consequences of these misguided policies” she continued, adding, “This community has lost lots of wonderful people, and our children are forever scarred by the trauma of the War on Drugs. Still, overall, here in Humboldt County, by working together with law enforcement, we’ve managed to turn America’s catastrophe into our little pot of gold.”

“Whether you make your living in law enforcement, as part of the prison industrial complex, in the black market as part of our vibrant marijuana industry, or in the white market, selling stuff that drug dealers want and need, we should all remember that if it weren’t for America’s tragic War on Drugs, we’d all be working at an Applebee’s somewhere.”

“Today we see that the whole country is falling apart, yet we have money, land and expensive toys. To deal with this new crisis, we need to work together with law enforcement in a new way, to keep America’s disaffected youth from coming to Southern Humboldt and attempting to reclaim their stolen future.” Supervisor Estrelle Fennell concluded, finishing with: “Now I’d like to turn the meeting over to Humboldt County Sheriff Morton Downey to talk about some of the steps the Sheriff’s Department is taking to address this new crisis.”

Next, Sheriff Morton Downey took the stage, and I liked what he had to say too.

“Thank you Supervisor Fennell. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to so many of you this evening. I realize that these are challenging times for all of us. We face budget cutbacks. You face falling marijuana prices, and we’re all facing a generation of angry kids with no money, no place to live and no future. They’re hungry, they haven’t slept well and they’re pissed off. If they weren’t so fucked up on drugs they’d probably slit our throats while we slept, so we in law enforcement do appreciate the effort that you, in the black market, have invested in reaching America’s youth.”

“We know that people hate us and the War on Drugs has given them plenty of good reasons, so we take steps to deal with the threat. Look at us! We don’t go anywhere without a flack jacket and a loaded gun, and if anyone looks at us funny, we pump them full of lead. You’d be surprised at how much more secure you feel when you’ve got a good quality Kevlar vest on and pistol on your hip”

“You guys have got guns! You know how to use ’em!” Sheriff Downey said emphatically, adding, “I see a couple of murderers here tonight. Hey, a deal is a deal, but we get calls from bereft family members every day.

They want to know what we are doing to find their missing family member. How do you think it looks to those grieving parents when I tell them that we’re short staffed, and there’s nothing more we can do to find their missing son or daughter, and then we put out a county-wide dragnet to find a teenager with a stolen bong? Don’t you see how this puts us in a very awkward position?”

“I don’t mean to be unsympathetic, but I thought we had a deal: we leave you alone, and you don’t complain about it. Well, we’ve left you alone, and now you’re making a big stink about a silly little burglary. Burglaries like this happen every day in Eureka, despite the fact that they have their own police force, and some of the most violent cops in California.

“We’re always happy to work with the community, but we do face budget constraints, and after dealing with Gary Lee Bullock, we’d just as soon let you guys kill each other down here as haul your ass up to Eureka. I know you guys are always complaining about the transients and the homeless and the people from out of town, but every time something really tragic happens around here, it always turns out that your kids are responsible. Keep it in the family, folks, and thank your lucky stars that there aren’t more cops around.”

After that, Supervisor Fennell opened the floor for questions, and local community members really had a lot to say, but I’m afraid that it will have to wait. Tune in to lygsbtd next week for the thrilling conclusion to the Town Hall Meeting held in Redway, last Thursday.

After Humboldt County Growers’ abysmal showing at the 2013 Cannabis Cup Awards, where not a single Humboldt County grower placed in the top ten, local cannabis breeders have been stirring up the gene pool in preparation for the 2014 growing season. “I guess our stuff has gotten a bit inbred.” said one Humboldt County grower, who asked to remain anonymous, because he was so ashamed of his weed’s poor showing at the awards, adding, “We’re definitely going to have to kick it up a notch if we want to stay competitive.”

So, in hopes of a better showing at next year’s Cannabis Cup, Humboldt County growers will try dozens of new strains. As part of the effort to “brand” Humboldt County ganja, and to encourage more community buy-in, this year’s strains have all been named after prominent Humboldt County citizens. Here’s a sample of what you might be smoking next Fall:

Gary Lee Bullock One toke of this brand new strain hits you like a metal pipe and sends you straight to heaven.

Ray Oakes If you smoke this strain, you’ll recall some memory from the distant past, with exceptional clarity, but you’ll get so distracted that it will take you two or three weeks to get to the good part.

Blake Lehman Smoking this stuff will get you so high you think you own the whole town.

John Casali This strain is almost psychedelic in that it makes you see shit everywhere.

Paul Encimer Imbibe this new strain, and you won’t be able to stop talking, but nothing you say will make any sense.

Charlie Custer This strain gets you so stoned that you’ll say “um” twice before every sentence.

Bonnie Blackberry I love this strain, but if you smoke it, it will make you so paranoid that you’ll call the cops, just to find out what they are up to.

Apparently, Bonnie is also very paranoid about having her picture on the internet. Good thinking Bonnie!

Eric Kirk Be careful of this strain. If you smoke it, you’ll become hopelessly addicted… to politics.

Estelle Fennel This strain is strong enough to turn a liberal lesbian into a redneck Good ‘Ol Boy.

Anna Hamilton This pot makes people very empathetic, so much so, that it makes poor musicians worry that drug dealers aren’t making enough money.

Rob Arkley Jr This strain has the opposite effect of the Anna Hamilton strain. Smoke a joint of RAJ and you’ll become totally self-absorbed, and oblivious to the needs of others.

Chris Giauque A potent local strain, but nobody seems to know where to find it.

Ken Swithenbank This strain will give you a ticket or take you to jail unless you smoke its joint.

…but mostly, you’ll probably see tons of this generic:

Humboldt Dope Yuppie A popular strain among growers for its quick maturity and heavy yield, but generally despised by cannabis connoisseurs for its disappointing high. With a complex, but not exactly attractive, aroma that consists of equal parts dead fish, engine exhaust and money, this is the perfect strain for growers who actually prefer the taste of expensive red wine.

Who knows, maybe the next Cannabis Cup winning strain will be named after you.

It has come to my attention that the full name of the accused murderer of Father Eric Freed is in fact, Gary Lee Bullock, not Lee Bullock, as I reported last week. My apologies to all lygsbtd readers, and to Mr. Gary Lee Bullock for the misinformation, and I regret the error.

I’m sure that this is a difficult time for the whole Bullock family. I certainly don’t wish to minimize the overwhelming grief that so many must feel for the loss of Father Freed, but for the Bullocks, I’m sure this is also a time of heart-wrenching agony and soul-searching. I’m sure they are wondering, “How could it have come to this?” and “Where did we go wrong?” No one wants to go through that, and if we can learn anything from this tragedy that prevents another family from suffering the same fate, then perhaps some good can come from this horrible tragedy.

One thing that years of reading newspapers has taught me: If you don’t want to see your kid’s mugshot in the paper as the chief suspect in an horrible crime, don’t give your kid the middle name of “Lee”. Damn near every murderer, drunk driver, domestic abuser, drug dealer, bank robber, rapist, you name it, whose mugshot I’ve ever seen in any American newspaper, has had the middle name of “Lee”. I think there is a valuable lesson here, especially for any expectant, or aspiring parents out there. Whatever you decide to name your kid, don’t stick “Lee” in the middle of it. Better still, just leave “Lee” out of the equation all together.

If you name you your kid “Lee” you can forget about saving for college. Instead, you’ll need that money for lawyers and bail. “Lee” is such a common name among felons that the default name on all computerized police reports comes up as Lee Lee Lee, before the officer hits a key. Using this default name in the computerized crime report forms has saved taxpayers millions of dollars. Cops are such notoriously poor typists that saving them three keystrokes on almost every report adds up to tens of thousands of man-hours each year saved in police budgets across the country.

I know it rolls off the tongue nicely, and lends a certain poetry to, without distracting from, the first and last names, but it’s just not worth it. No matter how hard it it is to say or how distracting it may seem, any other middle name that you can think of is bound to be better than “Lee” for the effect it will have on your child’s future. Bartholomew, Zachariah, Toadsbottom, and Bloodyboogger would all make better middle-names than “Lee”, and if the Bullocks had known this, I guarantee that Gary, Bloodybooger, Bullock would not be sitting in jail right now.

Face it, there’s only a few times in life when most people use their middle names anyway:

Early in life, when a mother is scolding her child as in “Studebaker Lee Hawk, how many times have I told you to stay out of Momma’s Prozac?”

When you get your drivers license, which is just a preemptive mugshot anyway. When a cop pulls you over and asks to see your license, the first thing he looks at is that middle name. As soon as they see the letters LEE in the middle of your name, they smell blood. Cops always know they can find some reason to arrest anyone, but when they get their hands on a “Lee” they know they’ve found their man. They know the paperwork will be a breeze. They just have to figure out what to charge them with, and there’s always “resisting arrest”.

Finally, the last place you’ll see someone’s middle name is on their headstone after they die. Stone-cutters love the middle name “Lee”. It’s almost as easy as a middle initial, but they can charge more money for a full middle name.

So, as a parent the choice is yours. You can name your kid “Lee”, for convenient scolding, ease of arrest, and profitable burial, or you can give your kid any other middle name, and give them a fighting chance for a decent life.

This seems like a no-brainer to me, but apparently too many parents have not gotten the message. Just last week, Shena Lee Christianson was pulled over for running a stop sign, and ended up booked on felony drug charges. If her parents had read this piece, they might have named her Shena Daphne Christianson, or Shena Priscilla Christianson or even Shena Shena Christianson, and as a result, she’d have probably gotten off with just a ticket and a talking too. Instead, she’ll probably spend the next few years taking airline reservations for 18 cents an hour.

So please, share this with every young couple or woman of child-bearing age that you know. It’s time to bring the suffering that these three innocent looking letters have caused, to an end. Hopefully, the Bullocks, and the Christiansons, can be the last to carry this awful burden, but why did people start naming their kids “Lee” in the first place?

I think we can trace the whole “Lee” phenomena back to the Civil War, and General Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army.

It seems fitting that we can trace all of the suffering the name “Lee” has caused, back to one of the darkest, bloodiest periods in American history, a time when brother fought brother with cannons and bayonets,

a time that reeked of death, dysentery, and gangrene, a time when the rivers ran red with blood.

General Robert E. Lee led millions of men to their bloody agonizing deaths to defend the rights of white slave owners to whip their slaves, or pay other white men to do it for them. They like to say they fought for “a way of life”, but it was a way of life that required millions of slaves to maintain; slaves who were kidnapped, shackled and sold as property, without regard for family connection, and forced to work long hours in the hot sun, motivated not by pay, but by the threat of the whipping post.

Lee fought for a “way of life” that said a white man could beat, rape and kill a black woman legally, if he “owned” her, but a black man could expect to be lynched if he dared to ask a white woman for a date. That’s a hell of a way of life! That way of life, that so many fought and died to preserve, gave us two of the most devicive, ugly, abhorrent stains on the fabric of American society:

Our ingrained racism

The middle-name “Lee”

Do you really want to remind everyone, especially your own child, of the screams and moans of men in excruciating agony, soaking in sweat, blood and excrement, delirious with fever from infected amputation wounds, best by flies, mosquitoes and maggots as they lay down their lives in defense of slavery and racism? Is that really what you want people to think about when they think about your kid? Is that what you want your kid to think about, every time he sees his own name?

Those three little letters open up a big wound, a wound big enough to swallow your child whole, with enough pain and suffering to curse your entire family for generations, as the Bullocks can no doubt attest. When you consider all that the name “Lee” implies, it’s no wonder that kids named “Lee” get into so much trouble, and it’s really about time we learn from our mistakes.

I mean, I can imagine that there were a lot of German people who weren’t thrilled with the outcome of World War II, but I’ll bet there aren’t many German guys out there with the name Hans Hitler Schmidt. I’ll bet that the popularity of the name Adolf declined precipitously after World War II, and has probably never recovered it’s prewar prevalence.

I mean no disrespect to anyone bearing the name “Lee”, and I completely sympathize with the burden they carry. At one time “Lee” was a perfectly good name, but today, it just has too many bad associations. Similarly, the swastika was once a perfectly good symbol, and you can find them by the thousands in mosaic tile designs in grand old buildings built before World War II. Today, no one in the Western World can look at a swastika without thinking about the Holocaust, so we let it go. Nobody uses swastikas in tile designs, logos, graphics or any other art-form for that matter unless they wanted to conjure images of institutionalized racism, antisemitism, systematic genocide, and mechanized murder.

Naming your kid “Lee” is like putting a swastika, or at least a confederate flag, in the middle of their name.

That is bound to have consequences that last a lifetime. So please, let it go. Unless you are Chinese, just forget about “Lee” as a name altogether. Save yourself the agony the Bullock family must feel every minute of every day right now. Don’t condemn your child to a future of embarrassing mug-shots and unflattering orange jumpsuits. Instead, pick a better middle-name than “Lee”.

What People Say:

If you haven't read john hardin's blog before, prepare to be shocked. I always am. (I can't help but enjoy it though...at least when I'm not slapping my hands on my computer desk and yelling at him.) He's sort of a local Jon Stewart only his writing hurts more because it is so close to people and places I love. Kym Kemp
...about, On The Money, The Collapsing Middle Class
... I think he really nails it, the middle class is devolving back into the working class. Pretty brilliant, IMO. Juliet Buck, Vermont Commons http://www.vtcommons.org/blog/middle-class-or-first-world-subsistence
BLOGS WE WATCH: John Hardin’s humorous, inappropriate, and sometimes antisocial SoHum blog is a one-of-a-kind feast or famine breadline banquet telling it like it is—or at least how it is through Mr. Hardin’s uniquely original point of view with some off-the-wall poetic licensing and colorful pics tossed in for good measure. For example, how it all went from this to that and how it all came about like the hokey pokey with your right foot out. You get the idea. Caution: this isn’t for everybody, especially those without a bawdy, bawdry, and tacky sense of humor. You know who you are. We liked it. (From the Humboldt Sentinel http://humboldtsentinel.com/2011/12/16/weekly-roundup-for-december-16-2011/)